The Secret Father (The Calvert Cousins 1) Read online

  He glanced at the unconscious man, his own actions disturbing him almost as much as his town’s close call.

  Before now, he’d controlled the bursts of rage he’d felt toward lawbreaking idiots who occasionally came to Bardill’s Ridge. Throwing that guy headfirst onto the marble floor could have killed him, and vigilantism wasn’t part of Zach’s job description.

  He didn’t want to be a killer.

  AT THE CHICAGO HEADQUARTERS of Relevance magazine, Olivia Kendall’s office door burst open. Her assistant, Brian Minsky, skidded across the sand-colored carpet. “Picture this.” He waved a printout at her as he collapsed in the chair across from her desk.

  They’d worked together from day one on Relevance. Since they never stood on boss-employee etiquette, she waited for him to continue, half her mind still on the competitor’s article she’d been reading.

  Brian remained silent. At last she noticed and looked up, plucking off her glasses with two fingers.

  Brian looked satisfied. “You’re with me now.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I want you to listen. This story has a twist.”

  She’d learned to give Brian the time he required. “Okay.”

  “You’ve been in line at the bank for thirty-eight minutes, waiting to pay your car loan.”

  “Not that big a twist.”

  He offered a sour grin, the equivalent of telling her to shut up. “The guy in front of you gets to the teller and opens his coat to show off his big gun. He orders you and everyone else in the bank to lie on the floor while the tellers collect the money. What do you do?”

  “I lie down.” Her first thought went to her five-year-old son, Evan. Face to the floor, she’d be praying like crazy that she got home to him. “And if I survive, I arrange a payroll deduction for that loan.”

  Brian cracked a real grin. “Funny. But I’m not finished. The guy sees you’re the local sheriff. You tell him he can’t go far. It’s a small town, and everyone will notice him. Instead of thanking you he asks who you think you are—Andy Taylor?”

  She laughed.

  Brian didn’t, and she erased her smile. This must be the good part.

  “What do you do now?” he asked.

  “I point my nose to the floor, and I curse myself for not taking advantage of that payroll deduction option my helpful loan officer suggested.” She paused. “And I propose to change my name to Andy. What do you do?”

  “I do what this Andy—his real name is Zach—I do what he did. I kick the gunman’s ass all over that bank, and then I tell him to look for another line of work after he gets out of the jail hospital.”

  “You’re kidding.” She sat back, trying to hide her Pavlovian response to the name Zach.

  Old memories fluttered at the back of her mind. She pushed them back. This might be a good story. “Didn’t Andy-Zach realize his response put everyone else in danger?”

  “He says not. Apparently, he took the guy out by acting purely on instinct. Instinct that told him how to overpower an armed man with one blow.”

  “One blow…” She leaned forward, jamming her stomach into the glass desk’s blunt edge. “What are you talking about?”

  “Now you’re on board.” Brian slid her a photograph. “You and I want to know what’s behind Andy-Zach’s story. So will our readers. They’re going to see the facts in brief paragraphs about stupid criminals in their Kendall newspapers, but they’ll want to know more, and we can give them a bigger picture in Kendall’s premiere news magazine. Is the sheriff an android or a man? He says he just reacted. A guy doesn’t react like that without training.” Brian leaned back. “Or I would have had a better time in high school.”

  She put her glasses back on and turned the picture around. The man’s face made her breath catch.

  Not again.

  Her heart boomeranged painfully. He was older, his blond hair longer than a military cut, his eyes more cynical and his body leaner.

  But once again, the man in the picture, the kick-ass sheriff, was Lieutenant Zach Calvert, looking pretty damn healthy for a man who’d died six years ago.

  She scanned the brief column beneath the picture. After she’d told her dad everything, he’d gone to the Navy. He was perfect for the job; he could get to the truth about the Loch Ness monster.

  He’d spoken to a Commander Gould, who’d explained that Zach’s crash had been bad luck in a routine training flight. Today’s article didn’t mention the flight or the Navy or the crash that had supposedly killed Zach.

  Olivia stared at his face in the grainy photo. She wasn’t wrong. This was Evan’s father. “Your daddy’s in heaven” had become her mantra. She’d hoped a daddy somewhere would make Evan feel like the children he’d envied for having fathers at home.

  Numb with shock, she didn’t know whether to be furious or relieved. At least this time she didn’t seem to be falling apart at the sight of a lousy photo. She’d grieved and recovered. For six years, Lieutenant Zach Calvert had been dead.

  Did that make being a sheriff in Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee heaven? Or hell?

  TWO DAYS AFTER Brian showed her Zach’s photo, Olivia’s plane drifted out of the clouds on approach to McGhee-Tyson Airport in Knoxville.

  Her shock had dissipated and been replaced by pragmatism. Whatever Zach was playing at, he had a son. And her son deserved a chance to know and be loved by his father. She had to believe he could be kinder to his son than he’d been to her.

  He’d gone to a lot of trouble to leave her. How had he persuaded his commanding officer to lie to her father? She’d barely stopped her dad from getting to the bottom of that question.

  With any luck, looking after Evan would keep him too busy to hunt down Captain Kerwin Gould and pry the truth out of him. She wanted a word with Zach first.

  After she’d called his office three times without being able to force a word out of her mouth, she’d asked Brian to set up the interview. She needed to see Zach’s face the first time he heard her voice. She’d believed him to be an honorable and loving man. She had to know who he really was before she invited him into her son’s life.

  And she wondered why he’d agreed to let her interview him if he’d been so desperate to get away from her six years ago? Maybe he’d forgotten her.

  Fine. He only had to remember enough to believe he might be Evan’s father.

  As the plane drifted on descent, she opened Zach’s dossier. After his accident, he’d spent three months in a hospital outside San Diego. Four months after that, he’d married one of his nurses. Within eight months of their marriage, their daughter, Lily, had been born.

  Which explained his silence. Had he been sleeping with Helene and her at the same time? Even six years later she felt like an idiot for trusting him.

  Zach had been her first love. Tall and tough, unstoppable in his pursuit, he’d made her think she was all that mattered to him in the whole world. Combine that with his status as her father’s last choice, and she’d hardly known how to resist.

  Looking back through newly opened eyes, she no longer believed in his passion or her own. She’d taken a stupid risk the night she’d forgotten her birth control. And after his supposed death, she’d made up a loving father for her son. The part where Zach had abandoned her never came into her stories.

  Finally she’d tried not to remember Zach at all. But then a day would start when Evan woke with sleepy, is-it-morning eyes that reminded her of his father, or he startled her with the long capable fingers that looked too uncomfortably much like Zach’s.

  She closed the folder and peered through the small window at the deep green forest flowing beneath the airplane. Dark and verdant, as mysterious as Zach’s true intentions. What had he wanted with her? Not that she’d expected forever, but a phone call to tell her she was no longer in the picture would have been nice.

  Looking at mountains that seemed to have no border with flat land, she felt like an intruder. She’d once prayed Zach would ask her to meet his
family. Now, possibly in front of them, she had to find out who he really was so she could decide whether to tell Evan he hadn’t died.

  Olivia slipped the folder back into her soft briefcase and then fished out another clean, almost untouched file Brian had put together for her. She hadn’t told Evan or Brian the truth, so she had to go home with some kind of story.

  The bank photo lay on top. Beneath were clippings from all the other stories Brian had gathered on the attempted robbery.

  After the plane landed, Olivia collected her bags and packed them into her rental car. As soon as she left the airport, the road began to rise. The interstate, narrowing into two lanes, had been cut into red clay and granite hills spiked with evergreens, smoothed by icy-looking streams.

  Like a bad omen, clouds covered the sun, dulling the red and gold leaves of the hardwoods. Rest stops and traffic came few and far between, and her ears began to pop at the higher elevation.

  She fumbled in her purse and briefcase for gum, but Evan must have found her stash. Her boy was a fiend for gum. She gave up and yawned to clear the pressure.

  As she passed the first mileage sign for Bardill’s Ridge, she breathed a sigh of relief. She ought to be able to find Sheriff Calvert’s office just in time for her appointment.

  At her turnoff, she followed the long ramp away from the interstate. No sign of life stirred within the trees. Such a heavy dose of nature could make a city woman a little anxious.

  At the end of the ramp a sign pointing to the left offered her the chance to turn back. To the right Bardill’s Ridge waited. Olivia opened her window and breathed in pine-laden air.

  She could go home, continue the life she’d made with Evan and tell Brian the story on Zach hadn’t panned out. Her heart pounded in jackhammer fashion.

  A right turn would change her life, but it might also bring her son a father who could love him. What choice did she have?

  She turned right and the road inclined again. Soon a white church spire peeked out of the leaves. Just beyond the spire a redbrick cupola topped a black-shingled roof. Extremely Norman Rockwell. Olivia’s heart rate returned to normal. She could handle a Norman Rockwell town.

  In front of her, a tractor turned off a dirt road onto the shoulder. The driver lifted his ball cap as she slowed to pass him.

  That never happened in Chicago.

  On the outskirts of Bardill’s Ridge, she passed a large blue clapboard feed store. The sign that clung to the roof of a wide veranda-cum-loading dock shouted Henderson’s in capital letters. Sticks of straw blew into the road from the bales on the porch. The men hoisting feed onto their trucks and into the backs of their SUVs looked up from their chores as she slowed to the speed limit.

  Zach had been right when he’d warned the bank robber that people here noticed strangers. She passed a library, two small churches and too many curious faces.

  Farther down the street, a sign painted with cartoon bears and rabbits and a bouncing typeface proclaimed the building behind it the ABC Daycare. Olivia missed Evan with a keen ache as the boys and girls spilled across the play yard.

  Closer to the center of town, there were more office buildings. As she passed them the women and men who strode the surprisingly busy sidewalks watched her. No matter what he decided to do about Evan, Zach would have to explain about her after she left town.

  Olivia glanced at her watch. Five past two.

  At the next stop sign she glanced right and found the big white church. She turned, but had to stop again on the edge of a small square encircled by wrought iron. On one side stood the church. Beside her, a curlicued, Victorian theater promised the latest releases. Opposite, a high school looked buttoned up and busy, with papers on the windows and a teacher holding class outside as his students inspected a maple’s bright shedding leaves. The redbrick building across the square was the courthouse, Bardill’s county seat, according to a tall, black sign posted out front.

  Olivia glanced at her briefcase, containing both folders and a photo vital to her plan. Zach had told Brian she’d find him in his office in the jail at the back of the courthouse.

  She parked and grabbed her things. Fighting wind, she slipped into the square, via an iron gate. Her heels slid on the cobblestone path that crisscrossed the grass. At the other side of the park she exited through another gate and crossed the wide street. Breathing hard, she climbed the courthouse steps and scoured the map at the front door.

  The jail was a left off the long, tall lower hall. Just beyond, a glass door led to a closer parking lot. Olivia swore and tried to tame her wild hair as her shoes clicked loudly on the marble.

  Reaching Zach’s office door exactly on time, she twitched her skirt into place, tugged at her sweater’s neckline and then watched her right hand tremble on the doorknob.

  If she’d known she was pregnant before Zach left, she would have told him. She was simply doing what she would have done then. If Zach didn’t want Evan, she could still say she’d done her best for her son.

  She opened the door, anticipating a dispatcher. Instead, Zach looked up from paperwork spread on a wide, scarred oak desk.

  His dark blue uniform emphasized lean muscles and the dark blond hair that nearly touched his collar. From ten feet away, a bleak shadow in his green eyes startled her. He was the same man, but he looked at the world from a different point of view. Something had drawn extra lines on his face and added more than six years of weariness to his eyes.

  Olivia clung to the doorknob, rocking back on her high heels.

  Zach stood and came around his desk. His gaze swept her, cataloging her head to toe. Not the way he had when they’d been lovers, but the way a stranger took stock of someone he might not entirely trust.

  Olivia forgot how to breathe. How much had she changed? It didn’t seem to matter. Zach’s smile held no hint of recognition.

  He held out his hand. “You must be Olivia Kendall.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  HIS VOICE WAS AS THICK as if he were thinking of making love to her. He clearly was not, but Zach’s low, husky, I’ve-waited-for-you-all-my-life tone had seduced her when they’d met the first time.

  She’d been unable to forget him. He obviously hadn’t bothered to remember.

  Seeking composure, she crossed to his desk and offered her hand. “Call me Olivia.” For Evan’s sake she had to feel out the situation and wait for the right moment to remind Zach of their past.

  The moment he closed his fingers around hers, the past flooded back, images of his hand on her waist, at her breast, the male scent of him as he’d lowered his head to kiss her. She gritted her teeth, recognizing the texture of his palm as if she were touching her own skin.

  Why had this man remained such a part of her? As if what she wanted to feel didn’t matter. She backed up a step. He had to release her. Curiosity flickered in his gaze, but not recognition. Her first love had forgotten her.

  “Have a seat.” Zach gestured to two leather armchairs that flanked a low table in front of his desk. “Coffee?”

  “Thanks.” A few moments’ distraction might remind her why she’d come. Sitting, she unzipped her briefcase.

  “Cream? Sugar?”

  “Both, please.”

  With a pleasant, interested smile, he handed her a foam cup and then took the chair beside hers. He stretched his legs in front of him. “You’ve come a long way to talk about a bank robbery that didn’t come off.”

  She busied herself with her briefcase zipper, covering her shock at his continued detachment. She’d made a child with this man, but she’d clearly had no idea who Zach Calvert was beneath his skin. She plucked a business card from her briefcase and passed it to him. “Let’s talk about your suspect.”

  Without a glance at her card, he slid it inside his uniform pocket. “I’m not sure I can add to the stories you’ve already seen.”

  Such a weak attempt to stall woke her share of Kendall determination. “I’d like to talk to the guy.”

  Zach glanced
toward the back where the cells probably were. “The FBI already picked him up.”

  Olivia pulled out the robbery folder. “I read that he belongs to a local militia group?”

  “Not local, from a town over the Kentucky border.”

  Zach sounded defensive, protecting his town’s reputation. He still loved his home. What were his current feelings on family?

  Olivia studied his knife-sharp collar, his gleaming black shoes, their high shine a hint of the Navy officer from Chicago. Addicted to danger and flight, he’d still been drawn to this rural mountain town, but he’d never mentioned a need to settle here for good.

  Whatever had happened to him had made him focus on home and hearth. He’d quickly had a daughter. How would he feel about their son?

  She gave herself a mental shake. “Did the guy want funds for a specific action?”

  “He requested an attorney when he regained consciousness. By the time we found a public defender, the FBI showed up and took him to their office in—” He stopped as if he hadn’t meant to say so much. “The feds are investigating the robbery and the suspect’s affiliations.”

  “So you disarmed him, but now you’re out?”

  He frowned, interest turning into irritation. “I did my job when I kept him from killing any citizen of this town.”

  She was searching for a sense of responsibility that belied the way he’d left her. “Weren’t you afraid the guy might kill someone when you attacked him?”

  “I recognized his gun.” His matter-of-fact tone implied anyone would have, and anyone would have acted. “I just had to make sure he was unconscious before he applied enough pressure to the trigger to fire.”

  “Your Navy training helped you do that?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “How did you know I was in the Navy?” His tone had dropped another disquieting octave.

  “I investigated your background before I came.”

  His expression went protectively flat, but antagonism jerked a muscle tight in his jaw. “What do you want, Ms. Kendall? Why come all the way from Chicago to talk about a three-day-old story?”